1

RED DESERTWYOMING’S

A Photographic Journey

Edited by Erik Molvar

2 3Introduction \ PG 4

CH 1 / The Empty Quarter \ PG 4 • CH 2 / Adobe Town \ PG 7

CH 1 / Kinney Rim \ PG 4 • CH 1 / The Jack Morrow Hills \ PG 4

CH 1 / The Ferris Mountains and Ferris Dunes \ PG 4

CH 1 / The Atlantic Rim \ PG 4 • CH 1 / The Powder Rim \ PG 4

CH 1 /Biodiversity ConservationAlliance’s Red Desert Campaign \ PG 4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

RED DESERTWYOMING’S

A Photographic Journey

Edited by Erik Molvar

4 5

A hiker looks out across the vast expanses of

The Big Empty proposed wilderness below the

Joe Hay Rim, in the Jack Morrow Hills area. Biodiversity Conservation Alliance photo by Erik Molvar.

6 7

Chapter 01

The Red Desert is punctuated by spectacular buttes, rims, and badlands, but the hallmarks of this cold desert landscape are it vast, open spaces. Here, a tapestry of sagebrush, grease-wood and hardy grasses and wildflowers spreads for mile after empty mile. Elevations here range from 6,000 to 8,500 feet above sea level, close enough to the sky for low-scudding clouds to cast a crazy-quilt of shadows that marches endlessly across the land.

THE BIG EMPTY

A pronghorn stands watch atop a lofty rise. With

keen eyesight, a top speed of over 50 miles per

hour, and an enlarged heart and lungs that allow

it to sustain top speeds for miles, the pronghorn

evolved in North America alongside cheetah-like

predators. Scott Smith photo.

Lichen-covered rimrock rises above the eastern end

of the Red Desert. Scott Smith photo.

8 9

These wide-open spaces are the last bastion of America’s most diverse assemblage of sagebrush wild-life. To the west, overgrazing has led to the invasion of cheatgrass, a non-native weed prone to frequent fires which wipe out the native sagebrush canopy upon which almost all life depends here. East of the divide, the coming of the plow has converted stands of native sagebrush to hayfields and row crops, dooming populations of sagebrush wildlife. As the wildlife of the sagebrush sea has contracted in the west and east, the Red Desert has become one of the last remaining strongholds for high desert wildlife.

The northern half of the Red Desert is dominated by the Great Divide Basin, where the Continental Divide splits to surround a vast bowl with no outlet to the sea. All rain and snow that falls within this basin trickles down to the center, where it evaporates from brackish lakes and salt flats. Over time, salts leached out of rock and sediment have been deposited in low-lying areas, creating saline soils where specially adapted plants like the greasewood, alkali sacaton, and Gardiner’s saltbush have taken root. Better-drained areas are robed in the ubiquitous Wyoming big sagebrush, the staff of life for a variety of desert wildlife ranging from antelope and sage grouse to pygmy rabbit and Brewer’s sparrow.

The southern half of the Red Desert falls mostly within the Washakie Basin, named for a famous Shoshone who is credited with great deeds fighting the Crow tribe during the 1800s. Lower in elevation, hotter, and drier than the Great Divide Basin, this area is the driest region in a desert state. Some spots receive only 5 inch-es of precipitation a year. Waters drain southward into the Little Snake River of Colorado or westward toward Flaming Gorge via Bitter Creek, which drains the larg-est ephemeral watershed in North America. Ultimately these desert watercourses contribute their salt and a scant trickle of water to the Colorado River system.

Some parts of the Red Desert show evidence of more than twelve thousand years of human habitation, marked by petroglyphs, tipi rings, and rock cairns atop low hillocks and high rims. This area is still looks upon as an ancestral homeland by the Shoshone, Ute, and other indigenous peoples, who continue to visit sacred sites and gathering locations for medicinal plants. In the 1800s, stage coaches, covered wagons, and freight buckboards creaked across the arid emptiness along primitive traces that linked the scarce watering holes scattered across the seemingly endless and empty landscape.

Today, the lands surrounding the boomtown of Wam-sutter in the center of the desert is the hub for a mas-sive oil and gas drilling operation that sprawls across more than a million acres of sagebrush. More than five thousand gas wells have been drilled in the Red Desert already, with fifteen thousand more waiting in the wings. The spiderweb of roads and pipelines that accompany the drilling of a gas field has fragmented the natural habitat into tiny swatches of dust-coated sagebrush, driving out sensitive types of native wildlife such as elk and sage grouse that cannot tolerate indus-trial disturbance.

Elsewhere, millions of acres of seemingly vacant land have seen little or no human activity. These enormous stretches of land remain unfenced, some of the last of the open range remaining in the American West. Here, staggering distances might be crossed only by the ghost of a two-track trail, navigable by jeep or truck, horse or foot. It is easy to lose yourself in the immensity of this wild and trackless landscape.

North America’s largest hawk, the ferruginous hawk

often nests on the ground at the edge of high rims, and

is one of the most sensitive wildlife species to industrial

disturbance. Mike McClure photo.

The Jim Bridger Power Plant pumps smog into

the clear Red Desert sky. This coal-fired electrical

generating station is fed by a cluster of strip mines

that use massive shovels called “walking draglines”

to rip the coal from the Earth. Scott Smith photo.

Wildflowers in bloom in Robbers Gulch. Ken Driese photo. The red and purple rims of Robbers Gulch, on the eastern

slope of the Flattop Mountains. Ken Driese photo.

10 11

Lost Soldier Creek is one of many streams that

trickles down into the Great Divide Basin to dead-

end in a shallow playa. Biodiversity Conservation Alliance photo by Erik Molvar.

The wild horses of the red desert

come in a wide variety of colors.

Scott Smith photo.

The red-banded shales of the Delaney

Rim in the southern Red Desert are the

same geological formation that forms

the Honeycomb Buttes, which was laid

down as lakebed sediments by Ancient

Lake Gosiute, which once covered much

of southwest Wyoming. Biodiversity Conservation Alliance photo by Erik Molvar.

The cliffs of Cooper Ridge tower above the valley of Salt Wells Creek in the

southwestern Red Desert. Biodiversity Conservation Alliance photo by Erik Molvar.

This stretch of the Killpecker Dune Field falls within the Red

Lake Wilderness Study Area, at the foot of the Luman Rim.

Ron Chilcote photo.

The Killpecker Sand Dunes are the largest actively

migrating dune field in North America, stretching for

more than a hundred miles across the heart of the

Red Desert. Ron Marquart photo.

12 13

The hidden canyons of Sand Creek to the west of

Flattop Mountain provide ideal nesting habitat for

golden eagles. Erik Molvar photo. WY13-5.

The prince’s plume, one of many colorful wildlflowers

that bloom in the Red Desert following spring rains.

Ron Marquart photo.

A herd of wild horses courses across the sagebrush. In

the northern Red Desert, some wild horses contain a

measurable amount of “Spanish blood,” tracing their

bloodlines back to the first horses acquired by Wyoming

tribes from Spanish traders in what is now New Mexico.

Scott Smith photo.

The high desert south of Green Mountain can be

brutally cold as winter temperatures dip below zero

and winds can howl constantly at sixty miles per hour.

George Wuerthner photo.

Pioneers traveling along the Overland

Trail carved their names into this

register rock near a brackish spring

near Point of Rocks. Biodiversity

Conservation Alliance photo by Erik

Molvar.

14 15

SONG of the RED DESERT

Off the path of clock-driven commerceWhere truckers and salesmen Race to achieve documentable results,Lies an expanse –Flatness – A far-off horizon –Dunes of wind-swept sand,Very few humans,And silence.We keep passing it –Racing by againAs if we’ve lostOur peripheral vision.Could we ever stop,Sweep the terrain with our sensesFor once,Begin to seeCoyotes, foxes,Struggling desert growth?Could we listen toThe wind –Whatever motion of livingWe might chance to hear?The sunlight, sand, andHorizon speak in their own (Inimitable) way.If just one timeWe were alert to it,Could we arrange to stop, look, listen –Like Indians, pioneers, settlers once did?If we couldStop this racing,This striving, for two hoursOr thirty minutes andNot measure our living,Could we hearNature singing –The desert singing?

by Robert Lever Green River, Wyoming

North Flattop Mountain hosts an abundant

population of nesting birds of prey, and also is

home to a rare wildlflower in the penstemon

family, the Gibbens’ beardtongue. Biodiversity Conservation Alliance photo by Erik Molvar.

16

FPO